


Perestroika

by intrikate88



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Memory Alteration, Mental Abuse, Triggers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-03
Updated: 2012-07-03
Packaged: 2017-11-09 02:58:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/450503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intrikate88/pseuds/intrikate88
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is not Bruce that scares her, not the Hulk. It is how quickly somebody, anybody, can be unmade.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Perestroika

**Author's Note:**

> _Perestroika_ was a political movement pushed by Gorbachev and is argued to be a cause of the end of the Cold War. (This is a massive oversimplification that verges on incorrectness, but I can point you in more accurate directions if you want an analysis of transitional Russia.) It means "restructuring".

__Once, there was a little girl named Natalia Romanova and she had parents who loved her.  
  
No, that couldn't be true.  
  
\--  
  
Unmake, remake.  
  
Once, there was a dancer. She listened to Tchaikovsky records and lost toenails to pointe shoes, wearing out one pair after another. She scraped her hair back and pinned it so tightly her eyes watered. But she never cried, not even when her feet bled through the pink satin.  
  
\--  
  
Unmake, remake.  
  
Once, there was a soldier. Then, the soldier was a wife, and she had a husband, their marriage sanctified only by the ribbon he tied around her finger and the life they shared growing in her belly. Maybe she left the ribbon on the shallow grave she dug for him, maybe she laid it on the mound of soil over their baby, a few months later.  
  
She probably died somewhere, too, fallen on the hard ground, starving, the snow covering her. Snow covers all the blood shed along the Russian border.  
  
\--  
  
Unmake, remake.  
  
Once, there was a man Natasha knew who had a metal arm and he was kind and sometimes forgot her name and always sparred with her like an equal and could shoot a target from a kilometer away. He had been born in the snow, he told her, crawling out of the womb of a mountain pass, and he was given a red star on his arm to remind him of his loyalties. They took their small comforts in each other, though if ordered neither would have hesitated to kill the other.  
  
\--  
  
Unmake, remake.  
  
Once, there was a room.  
  
It was red.  
  
Not literally.  
  
\--  
  
Unmake, remake.  
  
Once, somewhere in between fires and forgetting, there was a man who was not her father nor her lover. Ivan. _Ivan_.  
  
He wished to be something to her other than what he was.  
  
Didn't he remember that he helped make her the Black Widow? She doesn't leave survivors.  
  
\--  
  
Unmake, remake.  
  
Once, Natasha knew of three ways to kill the man in front of her who had an arrow strung, its point grazing her throat.  
  
It was two months after the words _Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall_ had echoed out of televisions around the world and crumbled graffiti-covered concrete lingered where there had once been a wall.

It wasn't even one day after that when she realized that nothing was really going to change. The same players playing the same game, molding their pieces into whatever form most suited them. 

"Look, we can stand here all day," said the man with the arrow, "but I think you're bored. I mean, I'm not going to pretend like we're best friends and I can tell, it's just that I've seen videos of you fighting and today you weren't even paying attention. World's changing, Natashenka, don't you want to be a new woman?"

"Only if I get to make her myself," she answers, and Clint Barton lowers his bow and grins.

\--

Unmake, remake.

This week she's Natalie Rushman from Legal. Natalie has fun at parties and is a really capable personal assistant and wears her hair in an impractical way that can be easily grabbed, because she can smile and demurely tuck her hair back when enticing Tony Stark, and then he'll go a bit glassy-eyed every time she tucks her hair back. 

Conditioning people is not difficult when you know how it's done.

This week, Clint is in New Mexico, questioning a kill order on what turns out to be a god. 

They spar when it's over, leaving deep bruises in each other's flesh like fingers forming clay.

 

\--

Unmake, remake.

Natasha is Natasha is Natasha. Clint is not Clint. 

Otherwise, she wouldn't be in India talking to the big guy. The guy who destroys himself every time he gets angry, and Natasha does not know how a person can live without anger. She does know, though, how a person can rebuild themselves after destruction, and _it is not that easy_. Anybody who claims it just requires a fresh change of clothes is a liar. 

Bruce pounded his fist on a table and she felt the paralysis of panic hit her bloodstream: that is exactly how fast a person can be unmade.

\--

Unmake, remake.

Bruce ripped himself apart in front of her to become that green thing and it is too much, too much. She knows fear; she knows fear doesn't matter when someone is trying to kill you, you _just fucking survive, or you don't, that is it_. This is not the same. Natasha sits in the dark, waiting to be needed as she hears crashes in the distance; Natalia Romanova was ripped apart, time and time again, and Natasha can't remember. She can't remember the faces of men who had thick, hairy fingers and she can't remember what was in the syringes of the needles that pushed into her skin and she cannot remember if it is true that she once had a child, and if so, what its face looked like. Natalia Romanova was supposed to be left in Moscow to tear herself apart and reform at the will of others, over and over again, never allowed to trust even her own body and especially not her own mind. 

Natalia Romanova feels like an infection that Clint carries, and that Bruce carries. 

Fury's call says that Clint is on the ship.

At least when she was getting ripped apart by someone else, she never had to see it happen.

\--

Unmake, remake.

It's like some horrible parody, the unflinching way Clint comes after her, grabbing at her as she kicks back. Taking all the ways they marked each other as themselves and trying to grab her like he had when they were sculpting the edges of who they decided they were, only this time he is trying to pull it all away, pull her apart and into the blue abyss with him.

He has been her one true memory. Now he is an enemy.

But once, when she was an enemy, he made a different call. He gave her the chance to make the bricks to build herself, for the first time. Traumatic brain injury is sufficient to cause memory loss and alteration in personality. Kicking someone in the head hard enough to knock them out can even qualify as severe traumatic brain injury. She needs his personality to change. Cognitive recalibration.

_Natasha_ , he says, knowing that she has more than three ways to kill him right there.

Her foot meets his head, and he crumbles at her feet.

\--

Unmake, remake.

His eyes don't focus; sometimes they are blue, sometimes not, and she knows that important things are happening elsewhere on the helicarrier, but they are not important to her. Clint can't escape the restraints and she would still stay in this room even if he could. She knows he can build himself over again, and tells him so.

_You know that? Is that what you know?_

Yes. That is what she _knows_.

Because she knows what it's like to be unmade, and he knows it.

\--

Unmake, remake.

He has to level out. She has red in her ledger; she needs to wipe it out. There is a balance in everything. She has taken all of Clint, marked him as hers, used him as a mold with which she could form the bricks of the new Natasha Romanoff, Agent of SHIELD; she has taken the life he gave her and stood solidly on the scale. Without him, her balance has been compromised. She has a way to repay what he gave her and she hates debts.

So she'll take him into battle, kill the man who took Clint's mind from him, and then push him until he feels the boundaries again, until he knows where he begins and ends. She'll shove him into danger until he knows he can trust his own decisions again.

And if Clint knows what Loki had planned for him to do to her, and that's a bit of cruelty she's sure Loki would find amusing, if he sees in his head all the ways that he would hurt her in the way she fears most...

Well. Then they will deal with that, too.

\--

Remake.

When they restructure themselves it is as Natasha and Clint, Avengers. Somehow they have a family, and it's rough and messy and reassuring, the way Clint does a Hulk impression to beat Tony to the coffeepot and Bruce is very unimpressed, and how Natasha and Thor like to discuss bloody fighting strategies at the dinner table, and how Pepper keeps them all in line without once losing her Louboutin-clad footing. Clint picks a room in Stark Tower right next to Natasha's and most nights crawls through the vents to drop onto her bed, whereupon she punches him solidly in the arm and they curl up together, making a nest of blankets. Some nights his tshirt is damp with perspiration from the nightmares Loki left him as a souvenir, and Natasha guides him in acting them out until he can trust the extent of his abilities reaches just far enough that he _can't_ hurt her; she will never let him. For her sake, and for his.

They have been restructured, and they are remaking themselves together, every day.

 

 

 


End file.
